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This article seeks to understand how live-streaming technology (i.e. interactivity and effective use of live-streaming shopping’s information presentation tool) impacts consumers’ credibility perception regarding live streamers.

The authors empirically examined their hypotheses with data (n = 405) collected from a survey of consumers who engage in live-streaming shopping.

The results demonstrate that vicarious learning strategies (both coactive and independent) can shape consumers’ benefit perceptions (i.e. virtual presence and psychological proximity), and further have a positive effect on consumers’ personal value (i.e. perceived live streamer credibility). Furthermore, the consumers’ perception of the live streamers’ credibility positively affects their purchase intention and ultimately influences their purchase behavior.

Building on the vicarious learning theory and means-end chain (MEC) model, this study investigates the mechanism of the IT features of live-streaming shopping in reducing consumers’ uncertainty about live streamers. This study reveals the value of vicarious learning experiences in reducing consumers’ uncertainty and further enhancing their purchase behavior.

Recently, there has been a shift toward the embodied energy assessment of buildings. However, the impact of material service life on the life-cycle embodied energy has received little attention. We aimed to address this knowledge gap, particularly in the context of the UAE and investigated the embodied energy associated with the use of concrete and other materials commonly used in residential buildings in the hot desert climate of the UAE.

Using input–output based hybrid analysis, we quantified the life-cycle embodied energy of a villa in the UAE with over 50 years of building life using the average, minimum, and maximum material service life values. Mathematical calculations were performed using MS Excel, and a detailed bill of quantities with >170 building materials and components of the villa were used for investigation.

For the base case, the initial embodied energy was 57% (7390.5 GJ), whereas the recurrent embodied energy was 43% (5,690 GJ) of the life-cycle embodied energy based on average material service life values. The proportion of the recurrent embodied energy with minimum material service life values was increased to 68% of the life-cycle embodied energy, while it dropped to 15% with maximum material service life values.

The findings provide new data to guide building construction in the UAE and show that recurrent embodied energy contributes significantly to life-cycle energy demand. Further, the study of material service life variations provides deeper insights into future building material specifications and management considerations for building maintenance.

Political Science in the United States has focused too much on variable-oriented, quantitative methods and thus lost its ability to ask “big questions.” Stein Rokkan (d. 1979) was an eminent comparativist who asked big questions and provided such qualitative tools as conceptual maps, grids, and clustered comparisons. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), arguably the first social scientist, also asked big questions and provided a universal explanation about the dialectical relationship between nomads and sedentary people. This article analyzes to what extent Ibn Khaldun's concepts of asabiyya and sedentary culture help understand the rise and fall of the Muslim civilization. It also explores my alternative, class-based perspective in Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment. Moreover, the article explores how Rokkan's analysis of cultural, geographical, economic, and religio-political variations within Western European states can provide insights to the examination of such variations in the Muslim world.

The paper aims to explore the relationship between accounting and racial violence through an investigation of sharecropping in the postbellum American South.

A range of primary sources including peonage case files of the US Department of Justice and the archives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are utilised. Data are analysed by reference to Randall Collins' theory of violence. Consistent with this theory, a micro-sociological approach to examining violent encounters is employed.

It is demonstrated that the production of alternative or competing accounts, accounting manipulation and failure to account generated interactions where confrontational tension culminated in bluster, physical attacks and lynching. Such violence took place in the context of potent racial ideologies and institutions.

The paper is distinctive in its focus on the interface between accounting and “actual” (as opposed to symbolic) violence. It reveals how accounting processes and traces featured in the highly charged emotional fields from which physical violence could erupt. The study advances knowledge of the role of accounting in race relations from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, a largely unexplored period in the accounting history literature. It also seeks to extend the research agenda on accounting and slavery (which has hitherto emphasised chattel slavery) to encompass the practice of debt peonage.

This paper examines the limitations on monetary profit maximization assumption in Quaker businesses, historically one of England's most successful set of business people. This view challenges the central theoretical assumptions of management and strategic entrepreneurship by demonstrating the influence of religious institutional logic over the profit maximization drive in business.

Using a historical analysis of Quaker religious institutional logic, the authors demonstrate how Quakers’ religious logic of simplicity in lifestyle and equality of all people led, in turn, to actions by Quaker businesses that limited the monetary profit maximizing for their businesses. Such actions are consistent with the Quakers’ belief that linked their business activities to their religious beliefs.

The present analysis shows that English Quakers had specific beliefs, enforced by the group’s willingness to expel members that limited monetary profit maximization among Quaker businesses. Thus, the authors challenge the typical assumptions of business scholars by demonstrating that business entities can succeed economically even when they do not embrace profit maximization as their core element. This paradoxical finding has the potential to significantly expand management and strategic entrepreneurship theory.

The authors discuss how religious logic can replace profit maximization as a foundation for business. This insight enriches not only the understanding of business but also of religious institutional logic. Finally, the authors address the call for greater use of historical analysis in the management literature.

The purpose of this study is to determine the factors that impact the trust of microenterprises in online selling platforms and cargo carriers and examine the consequences of a lack of trust.

This study adopts a qualitative exploratory approach and uses grounded theory to generate insights based on interviews with 27 microenterprise owners selling internationally on an online selling platform.

The results show that a lack of competence, an absence of an integrated claim system and a lack of transparency are the main factors affecting sellers’ trust in online selling platforms. The relationship between the sellers’ intention to continue to use the online selling platform and their trust in the platform was found to be moderated by switching costs.

This study is limited in that the results were mainly based on the sellers’ perspectives although the phenomenon of interest involves various actors. To mitigate this limitation and cross-check the data, the customer reviews and some of the sellers’ account statistics were also analyzed.

This study introduces the sellers’ perspectives on the dynamics of supply chain management in international micro trade. These dynamics provide a guideline for how to build and manage an online selling platform targeting microenterprises.

Unlike previous studies, this study examines online transaction behaviors from the standpoint of sellers, not buyers. Moreover, it is the first study examining the damaged or lost shipments within the context of online transactions in international micro trade.